[Starlink] Starlink Digest, Vol 12, Issue 6

[David Lang]

On Fri, 4 Mar 2022, Ulrich Speidel wrote:

> In terms of Starlink - I really think that it's a red herring, at least for 
> now. As I said, if Starlink can't muster anywhere near enough satellite 
> capacity to serve all of a small town in Montana that's surrounded by 
> gateways close by, then it's not going to be replacing the Internet as we 
> know it in a country 60% larger in area and 40 x larger in population. At 
> best it might be able to provide some backup in a relatively small number of 
> places.

It depends on what you set as your requirements. If you are talking about 
everyone streaming video, you are correct, but if you talk about less bandwidth 
intensive uses, a little bandwidth goes a long ways.

There's also FAR more of a difference between nothing and low bandwidth than 
between low and high bandwidth.

Telephone audio is an 64Mb stream, without compression, email and text chat are 
very low bandwidth.

20 years ago, you could have an office of 100 employees living on a 1.5Mb 
Internet connection and have people very happy. A single dishy is 100x this.

I agree that Starlink is not a full replacement for hard-wired Internet, and it 
never will be. But the ability to get that much bandwidth into an area that 
doesn't have wired Internet wihtout requiring special crews to come in and set 
up the infrastructure (like you would for geostationary dishes) is a huge step 
forward for disaster relief.

With capabilities like this now available, we (the tech community) need to look 
at options to be able to extend this connectivity from a point source across a 
wider area (ways to do mesh and have it not collapse, understanding channnel 
allocations, sane directional antenna uses, etc) including how to provide power.

And also take a careful look at the bandwith that apps are using and find ones 
that are sane to use. Since (almost) everyone has phones as endpoints now, 
having the ability to put a voip app on the phones and have them able to call 
and text chat freely within the connectivity bubble without any need to use the 
external bandwith, but be able to connect out in a fairly transparent manner 
(think how long distance calls were something significant 40-50 years ago, but 
were still using the same equipment and basic process). Can such apps indicate 
to the user if they are talking to someone really local (say sharing the same 
wifi), or more remote, so that they can

How can such apps be made available to the people with phones? (Apple makes it 
really hard to side-load apps for example), How can the services get bundled 
(raspverry pi or live CD linux images that provide these services and the app 
images to download for example). What can be done with OpenWRT builds to make 
turnkey conversions of APs into bandwidth-efficient mesh nodes. This includes 
how a bit of wire can go a long way towards making a wifi system work better.

How can we bundle lessons for techies on the ground to teach them what to do 
(and what not to do) in setting these things up?

David Lang